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Learn How to Draw with Abby Covert
1.2k Plays2 years ago
Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. In addition to being an active mentor to those new to sensemaking, she has also served the design community as President of the Information Architecture Institute, co-chair of Information Architecture Summit, and Executive Producer of the I.D.E.A Conference.
Abby is a founding faculty member of School of Visual Arts’ Products of Design graduate program. She also managed the team that helped Rosenfeld Media to start both the Design Operations Summit and Advancing Research Conference. Her most proud achievement is having come up with the idea for World Information Architecture Day, bringing accessibly priced education to thousands in their local communities annually.
In addition to running events, you may have seen her presenting her work on stage at: Blend, Business to Buttons, Confab, Creative Mornings, Designing for Digital, EdUI, EMACTL, EuroIA, Generate, GIANT, IA Summit, IA Conference, Italian IA Conference, Interactions, Midwest UX, Mind the Product, Momentum, Plain Language Summit, SearchLOVE, STC Summit, TalkUX, UI21, UI22, UX Cambridge, UX Ottawa, UX Lisbon, UX Tokyo, UX Week, Webstock, Wharton Web Conference, World IA Day
Abby has written two books for her students. In 2014 she published How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a book to teach IA to everybody. In 2022, she released her much anticipated follow-up, Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA.
Abby lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mom’.
Episode Notes
Products & Guides for Sensemakers
How to Make Sense of Any Mess
STUCK? Diagrams Help
My Monthly Email List
Related Episodes
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Abby's New Book
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope you are well. Hope you're enjoying some fall weather, if that's where you're living and listening to the show. And I'm excited to bring you a conversation with Abby Covert today. Abby has a new book called Stuck.
00:00:30
Speaker
diagrams help. I thought this would be an interesting conversation to have on a podcast that is, you know, primarily focused on making data visualizations and making presentations where we're often in the computer. And you probably know that many folks in the field really focus on the analog piece of sketching and diagramming before we actually start making things. And so I thought Abby would be perfect to
Making Sense of Information with Diagrams
00:00:52
Speaker
talk about that. And so we talk about her new book, we talk about
00:00:55
Speaker
the art and the science of creating diagrams. And we talk a lot about how she helps facilitate making diagrams, especially among people who say they can't draw, which I have said about myself many times. I've had lots of people in classes and workshops say that. And as you'll hear,
00:01:12
Speaker
It's really not about trying to be a graphic designer when you are making your diagrams. It's really about trying to make sense of content and make sense of information. So it's really interesting conversation kind of gets us away a little bit from the computer, which I think we're all sort of on too much these days, especially when we're making our visualization. So I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the podcast. Here is my conversation with Abby. Good morning, Abby. Thanks for coming on the show. Hey, John, thanks for having me.
00:01:41
Speaker
Uh, very excited to see you. Um, I am, uh, crossing my fingers for you on this hurricane, as I can see like in the window behind you, like the craziness starting to happen. Yeah, it's getting pretty wild, but we're going to hope that we get through this without a power outage or an internet loss. Right. Right. Yeah. If we could do that, then we, then we're, then we're, we're good to go. We'll just, um, so I'm excited to chat with you. You've got a new book out while for probably many people who listen to this show, they're more, you know,
00:02:10
Speaker
coding or working in tools and they're using computers to, you know, work with data. There's still a huge movement in the field to like kind of pause and step back and at least start with some sketching and diagram. So I'm really excited to talk to you about, about the diagramming piece, but I thought maybe we would just talk, you could just start with a little quick background of how you ended up where you are today with this is what your second book now that's out. Yeah. Yeah. Second book. Yeah, that's great.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm an information architect, which I don't know if that's a new job title for some of your listeners. But essentially, I help teams make decisions about structure and language of usually large technical projects, but not always. I've applied my skills in print design, web design, service design, interaction design, all the designs. And about eight years ago, I wrote a book called How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which was really out of
00:03:03
Speaker
being a teacher of information architecture and seeing how applicable the skill set and the specialty really could be to other people's jobs. So I wrote a book that basically claims to teach information architecture to anybody and let them apply it to whatever their mess is.
00:03:20
Speaker
During the writing of that book, it became very clear that diagrams were going to play a huge part in it. Because if you think about information architecture as being structure and language, like the most crystallized form of that is the diagram, which is literally just you've stripped everything away except for structure and language.
00:03:37
Speaker
So when I was writing the first book, I came up with the 10 most common diagrams that I had found as an information architect were helpful to teach my students to kind of get them to grok the idea of IA.
Creating Effective Diagrams
00:03:50
Speaker
And when the book came out, people loved those diagrams. They were just like, these are awesome. They're all about pizza and people love pizza. So that kind of helped. But it was just like simple versions of the things that we've all seen, but maybe we don't know the term for, like a Gantt chart and a journey map and a swim lane and things of that nature.
00:04:07
Speaker
But the thing that I found over the years of teaching with that first book is that there is a huge difference between people seeing a picture of a diagram, even when it's a template of a diagram and being actually able to make a diagram themselves that uses that template and actually expresses it for the right intention. And too often what I actually see is people like filling in templates in really like unhelpful ways where they're sort of trying to force themselves into a diagram.
00:04:34
Speaker
And often what I think ends up happening is you don't get the sort of powerful impact that you get in diagrams otherwise. So I became really interested in that. And when I decided to write a second book, diagrams was like the obvious topic for me. So my latest book is called Stuck, Diagram's Help. And it is a field guide for the trek between being a diagram novice and becoming a diagram nerd, which I definitely consider myself to be.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I want to get to a lot of this, but I kind of want to skip ahead because you've already sort of touched on it. So what do you say to the folks who say, I can't draw? And there's a lot of people out there who say like, I can't draw. And every designer I've ever talked to is like, everybody can draw. And then the response is, yeah, but really, I can't draw. So what is your reaction to that?
00:05:26
Speaker
I get that all the time, number one. I have kind of a controversial take on it, I think. So I come from a graphic design background. So I came to diagramming with aesthetics first. And I would say that over the two decades since my formal education in design, I have had to really pare back how much I rely on aesthetics to make good diagrams.
00:05:48
Speaker
So I think what I've come to in the last few years of teaching diagrams is that the people that are coming to it with that I can't draw, they actually have the best chance of really focusing in on what diagrams are good at. So first question that I usually put back to people who say I can't draw in this particular context of diagrams
00:06:07
Speaker
is define for me what you mean by draw. Because often what people actually mean is like, I can't render icons that look like little weeble people. I can't come up on the fly with a metaphor visually for this thing I'm trying to think mentally. And you don't really need any of that to get good at diagramming. So in my book, what I've really tried to do is lay out a grammar for diagramming. And I've really been dogged about it just being about boxes and arrows.
00:06:36
Speaker
like it's just shapes and lines it's it's just things that we all do know how to do um i have an almost four-year-old son and he is currently learning how to draw shapes and lines and y'all like if you want to see somebody who cannot draw
00:06:52
Speaker
He cannot draw and he's very close to being able to make shapes and lines. You know what I mean? And he's not even four. So this idea that like you would keep an entire tool set from yourself because of this fear of artistic expression, I think is really doing a disservice to kind of the field of diagramming. And I'm really hopeful that that's something that we can start to kind of demystify for people. Because there's a lot of jobs where diagrams
00:07:18
Speaker
are really useful and they're even there kind of in the background and they could be so much better if we had more of a focus on that kind of like shared vernacular of how do we make them? How do we think about them? And how do we make them useful? You know, I think that that's really at the heart.
00:07:33
Speaker
So when you're working with teams and you have someone or multiple people in the room who are like, I can't draw, I'm not gonna do this, like, how do you get the team to, I don't know, I mean, I guess that's kind of like a culture thing, but how do you sort of lower those barriers and make people feel comfortable that like, it's okay that you can't draw a fancy icon. We're drawing boxes here and that's okay. They don't have to look like,
00:08:00
Speaker
They're going to be published in a museum, right? We're here to work together. Like how do you facilitate that? Yeah, there's a couple of different ways. The first thing I would say is like that vocabulary lesson, like the visual vocabulary lesson, sort of like giving everybody the same toolset, even if there are people in that room that have a design skill set to make it known that like what you're looking for is the boxes and the lines.
00:08:22
Speaker
You can also make the boxes and the lines with things that are already boxes and line
Tools and Techniques for Diagramming
00:08:26
Speaker
like. Like I love using Post-its with tacks and yarn to connect things. Like that's a great way to sort of replicate the drawing. You would also like use whiteboards, which are super easy to like, you know, wipe away and they're supposed to, they feel like they're supposed to stay messy. So that can be really effective. And then the number one, like facilitation technique for kind of evening out the field is
00:08:47
Speaker
the people that are really visual and are really comfortable with drawing will be the first people that start to draw in a group. So that really already cuts out a whole lot of people. So I find, and this is true of any kind of facilitation, but specifically if you're trying to combat this, you have to give everybody a time boxed, like five minutes, 10 minutes, maybe even 15 minutes, depending on what it is, where the expectation is that they are making something by themselves.
00:09:11
Speaker
They are making a messy drawing by themselves. They are making a pile of post-its. They're going to sort with people by themselves. Something to get them out of the mode of the group think being the first. Because once people have made something, even if it's messy, they've invested in it. Now, it's important for them to actually get their point across. And even if it's messier than the other diagrams that are at the table they end up at, it all feels more like, okay, this is what we're all going for because we're all coming to this table with messy things.
00:09:40
Speaker
and now we're going to go forward. That's also the time of this kind of a facilitation where you can start to identify the people that are really comfortable with the visual part and take the pressure off of the rest of the group. If you're working in small groups and you've already gotten everybody's ideas out, you don't have to make everybody draw all the way through. You can be like, okay, you know what? Your boxes and lines, they look real good. And we know those people, right?
00:10:02
Speaker
Um, another little trick, if you want your boxes and lines to look real good, you need a thicker marker. It's really that simple. These ballpoint pen people stop it, just stop it. That's what the designers are. What they have on you is they have chisel tip thick markers that make really crispy looking boxes. So just get yourself some better markers. I'm not even kidding you. Yeah. No, the bigger the marker, the more bold the expression of it. And it really does. Um, it makes a huge difference. Yeah. Yeah. Sharpies for everybody.
00:10:30
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I love Sharpie, the thick ones, yeah, for everybody. That's also great for labels on diagrams because you can't write prose with a Sharpie. You have to limit yourself. So you got a Post-it note and a Sharpie, you're immediately thinking in the right diagrammatic mindset because you're already thinking in short labels because you're just, we're lazy and our eyes are only able to focus so small, so. Yeah.
00:10:56
Speaker
So it sounds like the way you've described it, and I've done similar things in classes with Dataviz, with the whiteboarding and the markers and the post-it notes, it sounds like your facilitation classes or efforts, it really sounds like you are encouraging people to go fast, at least at the beginning, to go fast and to move things around. Oh my gosh, yes. And so how do they react to that kind of towards the end? Do you try to build the bridge from
00:11:27
Speaker
that piece to their, you know, to whatever final product they'll be building, you know, days or weeks down the road.
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's so funny. I think that the audio only listener will not benefit from the diagram that John just drew with his hands. But I'm essentially going to voice over the diagram that you just drew because it's one of the focuses of my new book is really talking about that we are running two processes simultaneously when we are diagramming. We are running a mechanical process and we are running a very emotional process.
00:11:59
Speaker
And the one that you just described is, is kind of touching
Stages in Diagramming: Exploration, Modeling, Delivery
00:12:02
Speaker
on both. Um, so I'll, I'll cover both, but at a very high level, there is this sort of like beginning of the diagrammatic process where we really are just exploring. And if we get tied down too quickly, we could actually be going down the wrong road. So in a lot of cases, this is like the, um, you know, your boss's boss told you that they need a journey map and therefore you're making a journey map. That's like, woof, you've gone way, you just sped way through exploring and you're already like delivering on the thing.
00:12:28
Speaker
After we get through the exploring phase, we get into what I'm calling modeling. And I think that the modeling piece in the middle is actually where we're trying on all of those different forms to try to get the right one. Now, what the key to what is the right form really comes down to the decision at the beginning about who is your audience and what is your intention for this diagram.
00:12:49
Speaker
which leads you to your scope. So I feel like there's like this messy, yucky part in the beginning where we're trying to figure out like, who are we trying to serve? What's the problem we're trying to solve? How much do we have to cover? And all of that feels very chaotic emotionally, even though if you wrote it down mechanically, it's like, check, check, check. I know who it's for. I know what it's supposed to do. I know when it's going to be good. It's like, no, those are really, really difficult.
00:13:13
Speaker
So when we get into the middle, we're really starting to think about what is the structure of this thing? Where are these shapes and lines going to go? And with the scale that I actually have to work with for this audience, what can I even bring to bear in terms of the toolset that I have? And that middle piece, I feel like people have to be reminded that
00:13:35
Speaker
that's not easy either. The trying on of all of those different shapes, we fall in love with the wrong forms, we get lazy and decide the first one that we pick is the one, we run out of time and make that decision. So there's all these things that we really have to remind ourselves in the process of making good diagrams. And it's really not until that very end part where you get anything that even resembles a diagram necessarily.
00:14:00
Speaker
Like a lot of this is messy and it's happening on the whiteboard. It's happening in your head or in your notes or in little snippets here and there. And it's not until that final delivery stage where we're like, okay, this is the shape of it. It's kind of like this other template I've seen, but not quite. This is what I'm going to put into it. And then this is how I'm going to know that it's actually right for this audience.
00:14:19
Speaker
And I mean, that's a really long journey. So yeah, I think there's a lot to kind of like clue people into because it feels like because it's just shapes and lines, it should be super easy. Like if they don't just fall out of my hands the first time, is it worth doing? And the answer is yes. If it doesn't fall out of your hands the first time, you're probably on the right path. If it falls out the first time and you think it's right, it might only be right for you. And that's another kind of lesson to the whole game. Right, right.
00:14:48
Speaker
So you've already talked about when you're when you're working with folks you there's sort of like the design folks so they have the design eye they have sort of the aesthetic and then there's sort of this other group and I'm curious uh maybe I'm more curious about this other group particularly like the more data analyst researchy scientist group in there
00:15:09
Speaker
I find that some people get hung up in the sense that without being able to code their data and build something visually, they're apprehensive to start drawing, even though they may still have a good sense of their data, but they're not really quite ready to draw. So I'm curious about how you kind of build these bridges between, I guess it's really just a level of comfort really, but I'm just curious how you work to build those bridges between the different groups.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think that it really comes down to that question of our intention and our audience again.
Audience Consideration in Data Visualization
00:15:43
Speaker
I find that when I'm working with data folks, the audience question becomes really important because often the audience that we are researching is not the audience that we are presenting the data to that we found out about that audience. So we kind of have multiple audiences that we're keeping in mind.
00:16:01
Speaker
which really comes down to the scoping and scaling of the content that we choose to put in a diagram. In that space, we have to be asking ourselves, does this audience actually have the background to understand the way that this has been?
00:16:17
Speaker
shown to them? And does this actually make like a helpful version of this? What I see people do a lot of times, and I've been victim of this myself and I've also done this to others, is we put a diagram that we've made or a visualization of some data that we've made. We sort of like put it up on a slide and wave at it to be like, look at all the work that we did. Look at all the things we understand.
00:16:38
Speaker
So my first lesson here is like that's not a diagram and it's okay. It's also okay that the thing that you took the picture of is a diagram because it makes sense to just you and it makes you able to be prepared for that moment of presenting it. Whether or not you are inflicting diagrammatic insecurity on that audience by showing them that thing, you know, that's up to your ego to decide. But it's something really important for us to be aware of is like, are we making this diagram
00:17:06
Speaker
only to make sense to us. Because if we are, we can let go of a lot of the stuff that kind of holds us back. Like with data folks, you know, the integrity of data is incredibly important to folks that work in that field, as it should be, right? It's a huge responsibility. Well, I can understand why they don't want to start to render things that look visual too soon in that process, because they don't want to make promises that their data can't keep, right? That makes a ton of sense. But I think that they have to come back to that, like, what do you mean by drawing? You know, like,
00:17:35
Speaker
when we're sitting at our desk by ourselves and we're staring at a cursor versus a blank piece of paper in front of us, we're a little bit more free to do things that haven't been done before and that we haven't totally thought through when we have that paper and marker moment.
00:17:52
Speaker
And so yeah, I would I would challenge data folks to like if you have to tell yourself you're gonna burn the drawing when you're done because it's made a Promise that you don't know you can keep like do it. That's fine Have a little diagram bonfire at the end of your drawing process like that's fine if it got you into the the next mode the other thing that I would say and I use this with my own students is that you can simply give yourself the challenge of always coming up with two ways and
00:18:15
Speaker
almost always the trick out of the like, no, I got this default mode. I've done this a million times. It's like, okay, great. Spend whatever time it is to do it that way and then do it one other way and it will be harder. And often that is the more useful way for you or for the audience that you're trying to reach depending.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah. That's a real, that's a really good idea. Yeah. Always have these, these two alternatives. I really think, uh, you need to start, uh, selling t-shirts at side, say diagram, diagrammatic insecurity on it. Just like, Oh my God. I know white on black, just like big bold letters. Just like, um, John, do you, do you see the t-shirt that I'm wearing right now? Yeah. Words are hard.
00:18:58
Speaker
So yes, I think diagrammatic insecurity. I agree. I agree. Okay. Merch moment right here. Merch moment right there. Yeah. Okay. Hashtag Shafi, whatever. Um, so, uh, you just mentioned paper versus screen.
Tools: Comfort and Accessibility
00:19:13
Speaker
Um, in our emailing before, before we started chatting, you had sent me this funny little picture of, uh, someone had sort of taken like a map of Florida and like put yarn all over it to sort of mirror like the spaghetti hurricane map, which I thought was, was terrific.
00:19:28
Speaker
And I'm curious about, you know, either when you're working with people or just on your own, like what are the different tools that you use aside from, you know, we've already talked about Sharpies and paper and post-it notes, but like, do you play around with other forms? Do you, are there digital tools that you use that people might be interested in? Like what's the array of Abby's toolbox that I'm sure is pretty, pretty big?
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, I try to not go too specific into any tool and get precious with it. I used to be a person that would get like super duper like, I only make things an omni-graphel and I will have this until my death. And I really backed off of that. What I really have found most recently is like the first question that you got to ask yourself is really about who you're going to be working with and who you expect to have this diagram at the end of it. Because there's certain tools that are going to lend themselves way better to that.
00:20:17
Speaker
if you are going to be collaborating on a diagram with somebody and you're not using one of these collaborative whiteboarding softwares of which I will not name one because then I'd have to name them all and you know none of them are sponsoring this podcast I don't think so yeah one of those um but there's also like another one every single minute so I think like if you're working within an organization often the first question is actually identifying which one but
00:20:39
Speaker
people already have their login too. Like if you already have a login, there is very little differentiation on these platforms for you to be like, Oh, I use this one because of this, or I use this one because of that. Most of them have templates. Most of the templates, to be honest, aren't very good. And you know, they all have like a slightly different take on on the feature set. So the second piece of advice I would say is like, go to the tool that you are the most comfortable in.
00:21:04
Speaker
And often what I find for business people is that that's PowerPoint or Keynote. And that's totally fine. You can make beautiful, wonderful, actionable, helpful diagrams using PowerPoint. And a lot of it's like drag and drop. And like what you see is what you get, which is exactly what that audience needs. So I think it's really important when you're going digital to not slow yourself down. Because then we start making diagrammatic decisions based on the tool instead of based on our intention.
00:21:31
Speaker
Oh, this tool makes it really hard for me to make an arrow that goes from that to that to that. So I'll just make it, you know, a diagonal. It's like, oh, God, please don't do things like that. Like there's little things that like if you'd be more comfortable making it in PowerPoint, make it in PowerPoint. You know, if you'd be more comfortable and I don't know, do you still have CorelDRAW like bust it out? That's why. Wow, that is going back. Yeah, that is going back. Yeah. That's a throwback. I'm dating myself now.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, there's only only a few people on this listening really got that joke. Yeah. Hello, you're my people. I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I am drawn to graphics.
00:22:10
Speaker
when they're annotated where the arrow is just a little, like has a little curve in it. Like I'm just drawing those things, right? Like, cause yeah, the diagonal arrow, the straight line is like, okay, yeah, I could draw. You're, you're adding, you're actually adding cognitive load every time you do something like that. And I think that like, I talk about that in the craft section of the book about like, there's little decisions that we make that are lazy diagramming that we think, Oh, what's the big deal? But those things actually add up to a cognitive load that we're then placing on our user. I mean, um,
00:22:38
Speaker
Imagine if the arrow in your diagram is a garden path and you've decided that rather than work that garden path around the building so it wasn't obstructed, you wanted to run it through three other paths and you're going to make them jump over a little nub every time you do it.
00:22:53
Speaker
Why? Just go around. So I feel like there's things that we do because it's easier for us, but then we pay later on because we actually lose understanding along the way with the people that we were intending to reach. So that's like a decision that like, sure, go diagonal across all the lines when it's you making a diagram for you and you're moving really fast. But when you decide to like clean that up to be helpful for other people, that's one of those decisions you're going to want to revisit. Because if you take it as the default, like this is the most clear way,
00:23:19
Speaker
you might be missing an opportunity to do a little bit more work for your user that gets you a lot more close to the intention that you have for what you want to share with them.
00:23:29
Speaker
And so how do you think about this evolution?
Design Choices in Diagrams
00:23:33
Speaker
I was gonna say trade-off, but it's not as an evolution between what I draw, I draw a box with an arrow to another box to another box. But then when I, and then I'm satisfied with that, I've built two of them, but I'm satisfied with one of them, right? And I get to the thing, but I'm gonna build the arrow, it's not gonna be just a diagonal line. I'm gonna draw it as a curvy arrow because it just looks better and engaging. Like how do you think about that and do,
00:23:57
Speaker
Do the non-design folks we've been talking about, do they need to seek out the design folks and get to engagement piece? I think that there is a certain level of attention to graphic design and kind of just adult principles that you will get into as you start to make diagrams that you want to live on as objects that multiple people use. The curved arrow is a really good example. I'm thinking about the principle of similarity is something that might come up. If every other line and arrow in your drawing is straight,
00:24:27
Speaker
And all of a sudden you have a curvy one. Every person that you show that diagram to is going to go, why is that one curvy? Well, you see that happen all the time with things like color. I mean, I was in a critique with a student recently and the whole room was trying to figure out why this person had used color and what it was supposed to mean. And when it finally got her time to like, you know, tell us what she meant, you know what it was? She thought it jazzed it up.
00:24:50
Speaker
That's all. She just made things different colors because, like, it looked cool to her. Meanwhile, it created this, like, rash of misinformation about her diagram because we were all like, well, maybe maybe these ones are connected in this way. And like, we're just projecting stuff. But that's what humans do. Like when humans see a gap in the information that is provided, they will try to fill it. And sometimes the things that we come up with to fill it are wrong and ridiculous.
00:25:17
Speaker
And, you know, in your curvy arrows case, that could be something like to you, you're like, God, that looks really good. Or like, I want to draw attention to it. But unless you have a really good rationale for why it's different than the other ones, it might not actually be the most effective strategy.
00:25:31
Speaker
Right. So I just want to kind of go back to the beginning before we close up. So you defined for everybody information architecture.
Sense Making in Information Architecture
00:25:42
Speaker
And there's another term that I found you use on your website, sense making, which I think I know what it is, but I wanted to ask you to kind of define that for folks in particular in this area that we've been talking about of drawing and diagramming.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, such a great question. So first of all, I don't think that anybody really has this term like nailed. And if you look up the term sense making, you're going to see a plethora of attempts at it. You'll also see like hyphenated, not hyphenated, all the things. So at its core, I think but I think what we're trying to get at with when people talk about sense making is that there's this thing that we're doing that's not quite making things
00:26:24
Speaker
But it's not making decisions about what things we're making. And what do you call that? And so essentially, I think that sense making is about influencing interpretation. This was a topic that I got to speak with one of my favorite co-authors, Dan Klein, at the IA conference this last year, about really when we think about information architecture practice, there are two simultaneous practices within that, one of them being sense making and the other one being place making.
00:26:50
Speaker
And understanding the relationship between those two holes, we think ultimately determines whether or not you're practicing information architecture holistically. So what we've identified in ourselves is that over the course of my career, I've gone really deep on sense making. And Dan, who's a bit more of an architecture nerd, he's gone really deep on place making. And so now we're multiple decades into our careers and a decade and a half working together as collaborators. And we're going, hey, there's actually something here that's not
00:27:19
Speaker
quite figured out yet. There was a time when it would be described as West Coast versus East Coast IA. There's been a big IA versus little IA discussion. There's been many different attempts at cutting this thing out into pieces that we can then talk with each other about. I think the sense making, place making duality is something that I'm really interested in right now.
00:27:42
Speaker
But ultimately, the reason that I think it's important for diagrams and for anybody working with data is that it's really admitting that information is not the same as content and that the information in your user's mind is not actually something you can put there. You can only influence it.
00:28:00
Speaker
So when I'm talking about sensemaking influencing interpretation, that's really what I'm getting at is it's like it's not as cut and dry as like, put this message in the user's brain. Like we all know that we can't do that. But what can we do to influence their interpretation of the thing that we do show them, which is content?
00:28:19
Speaker
Um, which, you know, obviously is driven by data and all that. So I think like the division between information content and data is a super interesting distinction that not enough practitioners really start to get into. Like there's a conflation of those three terms to all kind of mean the same thing.
00:28:35
Speaker
like when does data become you know content and when does it become information and like you know i think the line between data and content is a lot more slippery because it all comes down to your audience like i can show a raw csv file to a data architect and they're going to pick something up from it but i showed that to a lay person
00:28:54
Speaker
That's just data. That's not content yet that can be consumed by them. And what the information that ends up in the user's head in both of those cases is vastly different, right? The data architect might actually be picking up really salient, interesting information. The layperson is picking up, this is not for me. I don't know how I got here. And I want to close this document very, very much.
00:29:16
Speaker
So it's the same content. Is it data? Well, the information is definitely different. So yeah, I think like sense making and place making both kind of like ask these really large questions of like, we're influencing things that are in people's minds. How do we do that? Like responsibly, accurately, consistently, efficiently? Like that's a really big problem set.
00:29:39
Speaker
I think that we're finally getting to a place where the things that we're being asked to design are complex enough that we actually do need to start to think about those things. Because you're starting to see teams that are way overweighted to one side or the other, right? Like they're really great at understanding their user and modeling out ideas, but then they can't execute for crap.
00:29:58
Speaker
you know, or the opposite is true, where you're like, moving way too fast, and you're making places all damn day, every day, and they don't make any sense to your users, right? So we're sort of like getting into this interesting space of teams that are trying really hard, but failing because they're not able to balance those two halves.
00:30:17
Speaker
Those haves. Yeah. Really. I mean, I think you have the topic for your third book. I mean, I, that's that is, yeah. Like we'll just drop it right here on John's podcast. The plans are in the works. Dan and I are going to write a book. Yeah. Dan already knows that we're writing books. Yeah. Dan, if you're listening, I've now promised a book in 2024. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay. So, uh, this is great. Um, so folks can check out both your books. I'll put links in the show notes. Um, where else can they find you and read more about your work?
Where to Find Abby's Works
00:30:47
Speaker
So abicovert.com is everything that I've ever done. I also have an Etsy shop where I sell workbooks. I sell signed copies of my books. So if you're not about buying on the zon, you can buy them directly from me. I always appreciate it. I also have a bunch of posters. I have some like digital download workbooks for information architecture tasks that are pretty common to folks.
00:31:09
Speaker
Um, and then some fun stuff. I've got like a, a coffee mug, a thing that you can print out and do with your kid to figure out what information architecture is together. So some fun stuff to check out on Etsy. And soon coming, right? The diagrammatic insecurity t-shirt will be. And soon on my Etsy shop, there will be a diagrammatic insecurity t-shirt just for John. Don't, don't tempt me, John. I have a print on demand user base and I am tempted to use it. It'll be there. It'll be there.
00:31:37
Speaker
I love, um, Abby, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really great, really interesting. And, um, yeah, I'm really excited about, about going through the book in detail. Awesome. Thanks for having me.
00:31:48
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you are keeping up with all the episodes. I've got a great bunch of guests for you all the way through the end of this calendar year and then into next year. I'll take a little break at the end of December, but coming up, we've got a lot more guests coming your way. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you'll check out more of the links, show notes, episode notes, stuff going on, on all and around PolicyViz. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:32:16
Speaker
The whole team helps bring you the Policy Vis podcast. Intro and outro music is provided by the NRIs, a band based here in Northern Virginia. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Sotsky-Ramirez, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:32:39
Speaker
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